…and you’ve still got nothing but “but Hamas” to bring to the table.
And now you are back to the very same, tired " by your logic" shtick, where you will randomly pick another world event, strip it of context, and say they are the same.
But they are not the same. For starters, ANZAC day largely commemorates the failed Gallipoli campaign, where Kiwis and Aussies were sent to the slaughter by the British empire. Instead of the Japanese, you should be talking about the Turkish people, but perhaps that isn’t racist enough for you.
And my great-grandfather was a member of the Mau. He was murdered by New Zealand forces in what I consider to be a warcrime. So I think you should maybe shut-the-fuck up trying to act smart and talk about things you don’t even know about.
No. This is you. I’m talking about YOU. Palestinians aren’t important to you.
And the thing is, if that was all you had done here, I would have shut up and left you to it.
But that isn’t what you did. You came in here and started telling lies.
Yes, how it was conducted was an atrocity.
Liar.
I think they should be released. I think that Isreal and Hamas need to negotiate in good faith and bring this to an end.
But I don’t see that happening. Not because of Hamas. But because this is a genocide. Gazans will either escape from Gaza, will have to live under brutal occupation, or they will die. There will be no two-state-solution. There will be no “fantasy utopia” that you’ve imagined will happen post-Hamas. And I think that you are going to be just fine with that.
I guess the people guarding the hostages don’t count because they weren’t kidnapping terrorists, just friendly Gazan AirBNB hosts who kindly let some Israelis stay over for free.
Unless the word is “refugee camp”, in which case a city in Gaza where people have been living for decades and multiple generations is a “refugee camp”.
Yeah, laughing at dead kids, there’s that IOF-style sense of humour the whole world has come to know so well in the last months.
The people guarding the hostages didn’t count because there wasn’t a way to get them, apparently, without slaughtering scores of innocents. Rendering them illegal targets by the laws of war.
We’ve been over this before - I’ll change my usage when you petition the UN not to call the also-decades-old refugee camps in North Africa and SE Asia the same thing…
Gotcha. So as long as Hamas hides behind civilians, you consider them untouchable. You want to reward them for their tactics. Which is why we will never come to an agreement on this issue.
The laws of war don’t say you cannot attack military targets in the enemy puts civilians in front of them, by the way. Putting your hostages in an apartment building is, in fact, a war crime, because people who don’t have their heads up their own ass comprehend that doing so will force the country you took hostages from to cause civilian casualties when they attack your legitimate military targets. As they are allowed to do. Because the idea that an enemy can do whatever they want to you as long as they can find a noncombatant to put in front of their position is obviously stupid, and no one peddles it in any context aside from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
One or two civilians, I could understand. Hundreds? Damn straight.
Well, no, I’ve known that for months.
It does have quite a lot to say about proportionality, though.
War crimes by your enemy do not excuse your own.
Nobody was “forced” to do anything. Utter, utter bullshit absolving the IOF from any responsibility. Just passive puppets. Bullshit.
Article 51.5(b) says different. Unless your calculus is that 200 Palestinian civilians < 4 Israeli hostages as a military advantage, which is , well, about par for the course, I suppose.
This is quite clearly NOT the goal of Netanyahu and his allies. Their goal is to prolong their political survival, and they will very clearly let the hostages rot or Hamas survive in order to prolong the war if they think it will benefit them. They’re, functionally speaking, allies of Hamas.
And you’ve been carrying their water without question for months and months.
Killing hundreds of Gazan civilians helps Hamas. I think the Israeli government and IDF should do everything they can to avoid helping Hamas. It’s great that these hostages have been recovered – hopefully, the casualty reports are wrong and the IDF didn’t greatly assist Hamas with the activities surrounding their rescue.
The absolute WORST thing for Hamas in the long run would have been, and still would be, the Israeli government halting violence that harms Gazan civilians en masse and working internationally to isolate and eliminate the funders and protectors of the leadership of Hamas (which largely are NOT in Gaza). Israel has essentially been doing Hamas’s bidding for months.
This is a good cite for customary international law. However, neither Hamas nor Israel have even signed, let alone ratified that particular treaty (Protocol I of the Geneva Convention).
If the only way to get Hamas is to kill hundreds of civilians, damn right they’re untouchable. The ends don’t justify the means. It sucks, because Hamas needs killing, but they don’t need killing as much as those children need not killing.
But of course that’s not the only way to get the hostages free.
And I agree: responding to Smapti serves no purpose. He’s a sociopath.
And damn, it shows. Because both sides have behaved incredibly brutally. This whole war is kinda an advertisement for the value of those international laws.
I’m delighted that a few hostages were rescued. But add me to those who don’t think it was worth hundreds of innocent lives. That’s a lot of tragedy. A lot of pain and grief. And from the perspective of Israel’s medium and long term survival, a lot of new recruits for Hamas, among their relatives and friends. I can’t see how it could possibly be worth it.
Unless the goal is just to prolong the war and keep Bibi in power.
International law is a weak spot of mine. I thought the traditional laws of war, that is before the Geneva Protocols and Rome Statutes, held a defending belligerent that uses civilians as a meat shield - in this case Hamas - responsible for the inevitable casualties. Not the attacking belligerent. This was my personal take-away from a previous discussion I had about firebombing and nuclear bombs during WWII, on these boards I think. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
…I challenge the idea that the hundreds of people just trying to go about their day that ended up getting killed or injured yesterday were in any way being used as a “meat shield.”
There is no circumstance under which a person can shift responsibility for killing children onto someone else. They can make a case that the evil they’ve done is justified by the good outcome, but that’s a very high bar–and at minimum must involve saving more innocent lives than are lost.
But there are circumstances under which a person can escape legal/criminal responsibility for killing children, or even shift that responsibility to somebody else. The requirement is that the military objective is valid and not excessively disproportional to anticipated incidental civilian casualties, and it’s hard to justify the hostage rescue under that standard (it’s certainly not Entebbe). There is no requirement that innocent lives saved outweigh innocent lives lost.
I read that the hostages were being held in two apartments in a residential area populated by civilians. Additionally it was a surprise attack in broad daylight so the IDF wouldn’t have cleared the streets of civilians before commencing the operation or given advance warning of this attack specifically.
…and if a terror organization were holding four hostages in two apartments in a residential area populated by civilians in downtown San Francisco, how many civilian casualties do you think would be acceptable? 300 dead, 600 wounded sound about right to you?
Under the apparent pretence of an aid truck, something that is expressly forbidden because it puts all the lives of aid workers in danger. Now every aid truck in Gaza risks either getting blown up by IDF forces, or under increased scrutiny from Hamas.
